06/02/2010

Review: 'Stations West' By Allison Amend

"Stations West" By Allison Amend Louisiana State University Press, $18.95

Reviewed By Lynna Williams, special to the Tribune

Allison Amend has taken an historical fact—the first Jewish settler in Oklahoma was named Bogy (or Boggy) Johnson—and from it, spun out a multi-generational tale of hardship and heartbreak. There’s no place in "Stations West" for the grandeur of the mythic American West; instead, the novel is a precise rendering of lives lived on the emotional and physical margin in harshly unforgiving places and times. Its strengths are its use of language, and compelling stories of each successive generation in a family founded on necessity and sustained on cross-purposes.

When Amend’s renamed Boggy Haurowitz arrives in Indian Territory in 1859, the leather satchel he carries contains a poor man’s provisions—and “a small, worn copy of the Torah, no bigger than a fist, printed in Hebrew script on parchment and bound tightly with horsehide.” The Torah is a relic of a past he barely remembers; he is an insignificant part of a larger, mostly unfathomable world, and survival is day-to-day. Boggy’s small presence in the novel is emblematic of the way that people came and went in the vast space of the West, swallowed up, then brought back, by changing circumstance.

That pattern of going and coming is played out in the Haurowitz family over and over. Boggy leaves his wife and children, and when he comes back, finds that she has been killed in the process of running away with his cousin, recently arrived from the Old Country. All but one of his children dies, too. His surviving son, Moshe, marries and settles in Orerich, Colorado, a wild frontier town where he works as a dishwasher in a bar, and his wife, Alice, grows increasingly indifferent to him and their son, Garfield. Moshe leaves them—Alice to turn to prostitution, Garfield to fend for himself--as Boggy left Moshe. Moshe returns, and then it’s Alice’s turn then to run away. Moshe and his reclaimed son go together to what is then Oklahoma Territory, to Denton Station, “the town that Boggy first set foot in.” Garfield will grow up and leave there to ride the rails, but will come back one day, a hard boy who has become a damaged man in ways that don’t stop with losing his leg. Garfield also leaves behind his ethnic heritage, although future generations will return to it.

There’s more to the characters in "Stations West" than they will ever be able to say out loud, which puts a premium on Amend’s handling of point of view. They have exterior lives: “Each morning they move about as if the confusion of having just woken up refuses to wear off. There is the numbing ritual of chores, duties that require the vacant concentration of heavy labor. And that is how they get through the days.” But it’s Amend’s careful construction of their interior lives that allows us to see who they are, who the past and present has combined to make them. “(Garfield) tells himself that she deserves more than what he is able to offer. But, truly, it is that he does not want her. Her fidelity makes him feel unworthy, inadequate. It is as tiresome as his limp.” One of the pleasures of the novel is watching history take place in, and around, the characters, including statehood for Oklahoma, boom days, discovery of oil in Oklahoma, and finally the coming of the great Depression.